We all dress to connote certain ideas. We dress to give off a particular impression of ourselves to the world, we dress to protect our own selves and to allure others all at once. Veiling, in the strict sense, is seen by some as oppressive, others as empowering. But to use the word more generally, we all begin the day by veiling ourselves. There is significance in the extent to which we cover our skin, significance in choosing who we allow access to our bodies. Fabric, veils and scarves and clothes, are often the medium by which we denote desire for a certain other person and confidence in ourselves. Emma Crane Jaster’s To Know a Veil performed at last Friday’s Soapbox at Hillyer Artspace raised these issues of physicality and dress. Using five models, many outfits, and an audio element that alternated music with quotations from women the artist had interviewed on their bodies and ideas of beauty, fashion, and veiling, Jaster’s piece was broad enough that I found ideas both familiar and surprising.

When I arrived, I passed through the crowded main room and walked into the side gallery, running into a large veiled object guarded by a woman wearing a power suit and sunglasses. Looking around her into the gallery, I saw it was filled with pedestals holding veiled objects. I asked her if I could see what was inside and was told that while I couldn’t look into the large one at the door, I was allowed to lift the others. Not everything is available for you, the guard told me. I could tell the contents of one cage without needing to lift the veil: the smoke of the incense was floating through the thin fabric, drawing me over. I wanted to know that I knew what was being hidden from me, I wanted the satisfaction of confirmation. The incense was escaping its veil despite the attempt to hide it.

I turned my attention to the runway. Sunglasses-assistant rushed me out of the way as the performers paraded past me for the first walk of the evening. The women showed off their dresses, then modeled veils covering their full bodies, all the time chased by a photographer. On the runway they traded veils, hiding and revealing each other to the crowd. Some performers refused to be unveiled, jumping away from the other women who picked at their hems.The performers all streamed into one of the side galleries for a short photo shoot. They posed with the veiled objects, changing positions as the photographer called “Next!” again and again. The audience was too large to follow them so for the most part they stayed in their seats, left out of what was happening in the next room. This left the crowd curious and possibly distracted or annoyed. Or pensive: I enjoyed the moment to reflect on the performance. Regardless, because of the crowd there were aspects of the performance that were veiled. Jaster stated before the performance that she hoped it would “foster conversation” (in the spirit of Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics). By using every room in Hillyer’s gallery, she accomplished that. Only an audience of 15 or 20 would have been able to comfortably follow every section of the performance. Unless an artist plans on a certain size audience there’s no way to account for instances such as these, but this occasion revealed a very appropriate coincidence.Until this point, both the visual and the audio components had explored primarily Eastern and Muslim ideas of veils, but this is when I felt a shift. First each performer came out with a colored scarf, displaying it, putting it on in a different way. The last performer blindfolded herself with a purple scarf and was led away, the photographer snapping after them.A break in the music created an immediate shift from the fashion show feeling and the five performers returned. They arranged themselves in the small, square hallway between the galleries. Suddenly the covered woman, now revealed, was standing underneath a tent made of her own veil. She squatted next to the pot and washed herself with the water inside while humming a short song.Following this pause, one performer came back to the runway dressed like a bride in a knee-length white dress and long white veil. At this point the quotations were concerned with marriage and power. Since veiling at marriages is a common practice around the world, the climactic moment transcended ideas of Eastern and Western culture. One woman described how excited she was to let her hair down in front of her husband for the first time on the night of their marriage. Another woman explained that she would never wear a wedding veil, but that she would also probably never get married.We returned to Eastern culture with each performer modeling a different way to wear a sari, demonstrating the technique involved in draping the fabric. To conclude the piece, each performer came down the runway wearing a different outfit, one I presume was of her own choice.During the performance my mind was swarming with ideas. The colored veils made me think of queer bandana code, the tent reminded me of a Jewish wedding chuppah, the veils are reminiscent of burial shrouds. I don’t wear a veil myself, but regardless I began to think about how I’ve used veils in my life and what parts of my body I try to veil when I dress.To be sure, the idea of veiling is more complex than I’ve allowed for here and more complex than Jaster had time to explore in her performance piece. The religious-political implications of being a veiled woman were not Jaster’s primary focus; her interest, as I understand it, lies more in veiling’s social and physical associations. At a time when women’s bodies continue to serve as a political battleground in countries all over the world, from the United States to India to France, Jaster’s performance is both topical and poignant. She chose to approach this knotted, sensitive knot by first picking a thread that is more universal than religion or politics: the body itself, and beauty and physicality and how we choose to show ourselves to the world.